Julian novelist Don Winslow has a new movie based on his book and a new bestseller

What: Don Winslow appearance and book signing, co sponsored by U-T San Diego and Warwick's

When: Wednesday, 7:30 p.m.; signing begins approximately 8:30 p.m.

Where: Warwick’s, 7812 Girard Avenue, La Jolla

Seating: Event is free; Standing room is first come first serve. Limited reserved seating available with purchase of “The Kings of Cool”

Information: (858) 454-0347

There was a time when crime novelist Don Winslow felt compelled to begin any conversation about his work by explaining that he’s not that Don Winslow.

He’s not the one who pens steamy erotica. “I did not write ‘Slave Girls of Rome,’” he’d tell audiences who might have thought otherwise after typing his name into Amazon.com. “I swear.”

His explaining days should be just about over now.

“Savages,” the movie based on his widely acclaimed 2010 best-seller of the same name, opened Friday to strong reviews. Winslow co-wrote the screenplay. His prequel to that story, “The Kings of Cool,” came out last month and is a best-seller, too.

All that’s put Winslow, a surfer when he has the time, on a different kind of wave in recent weeks, the publicity wave. There he was chatting with Soledad O’Brien, cracking wise with Craig Ferguson, sounding solemn on NPR.

If, at age 58, this is his moment, he seems unfazed by it — happy for the success, but not planning to move to Beverly Hills any time soon. “My life is still pretty much the same as it’s ever been,” he said. “I still live where I live. My friends are still my friends.”

He and his wife of 27 years, Jean, split their time between a ranch they’re remodeling in Julian and an oceanfront condo in Solana Beach. He gets up every day at 5 a.m. — a habit forced on him by the arrival of their son, Thomas, some 22 years ago — and writes.

Quote: “I guess my ambition is, whenever I finish up, if you took all my California crime books and put them together, you are going to get a history of crime in this part of Southern California, from Newport Beach on down.”

He has three books going now, which is his norm. He’s also working on the screenplay for another of his titles, “Satori,” which if all goes according to plan will star Leonardo DiCaprio.

He jokes that he’s so busy because he has “the attention span of a gerbil on crack,” but that quip masks a lifelong curiosity about people and places and a resume startling for its sense of adventure. Child actor. African-studies major. Safari guide in Kenya. Cattle herder. Private detective on both coasts.

Nowhere is his restless nature more apparent than on the printed page. His first five crime novels all featured the same detective, a common approach designed to build a following among readers, but Winslow grew bored with that, felt like he was just repeating himself. He changed direction.

Six books later, when he sat down to write what would become “Savages,” he was feeling ornery about the way crime fiction was getting compartmentalized — mystery, thriller, police procedural — and decided to skirt the genre’s borders.

“I just wanted to kick the traces a bit and write something the way I heard it in my head and saw it in my mind’s eye without regards to the so-called rules,” he said. “Who made those up, anyway?”

A new voice

The first chapter was two words: “(Blank) you.”

It was a jolt, and Winslow said he knew people would either be so offended they’d toss the book aside or so intrigued they’d keep reading.

But even after he’d amused himself with his snarkiness, he didn’t have a story. “OK, wise guy, what about it?” he remembers thinking. “What do you want to say?”

Rumbling around in his head was a gruesome clip from the Internet someone had sent him of a drug cartel beheading people. That gave him his “what if?” opening, and soon he was off and writing about two 20-something pot-growing friends, Ben and Chon, and their shared girlfriend Ophelia, O for short.

Off and writing in a new way, too. He’d long favored short chapters, but now the chapters had sentences that were short, too — clipped and skittering down the page the way thoughts do across the mind. The lines were full of sharp commentary about society and family, too, and frequently funny. The pacing was ferocious.

And entirely intentional.

Winslow said he hears a new voice in California these days. It’s a combinations of a number of different languages and inflections. It’s fractured, and so is the nature of how we share stories.

“It used to be you read the newspaper or you read a book or you watched a documentary on television,” he said. “Now it’s all fragments, from multi-directions and multimedia. I wanted to write something that reflected the reality of that, for good or for ill.”

He got the idea from watching his son study for school. Thomas would be working at the computer, headset on, the TV playing, his phone just a hand-grab away. “It flew against everything we’d ever been taught about avoiding distractions and doing one thing at a time,” Winslow said. “But he was getting all A’s.”

Now add Twitter, with people communicating in 140 characters, and Winslow sees the emergence of a generation of intellectual multi-taskers. “Everything comes in so fast, and from so many different directions, but it does not seem to bother them,” he said. “They absorb it.”

He wrote the first 14 pages of “Savages” and sent it off to his screenwriting partner, Shane Salerno. “Is this any good or am I just crazy?” he remembers asking. “Not that the two are mutually exclusive.”

Which he did, and filmmaker Oliver Stone loved it, and now Winslow’s written a prequel, which also has an opening chapter with just two words: “(Blank) me.”

Where that comes from

The Winslow Effect. That’s what Janet Maslin called it in The New York Times, praising the author’s ability to “fuse the grave and the playful, the body blow and the joke, the nightmare and the dream.”

In person, during interviews, Winslow is only half that equation. He’s playful, he jokes, he talks about his dreams and how they came true. Slight in stature, quiet in demeanor, he seems more like the guy who directs high school plays in Julian (which he does) than one who writes about violent death.

“You wonder where that comes from, right?” said his wife, Jean.

They met because one of his best friends was dating her sister. She’s watched him go from a guy who used to read crime novels while on private-eye stakeouts to a guy who does stakeouts in his office and writes three books at a time.

She noticed a change in his work, darker and more violent, with “The Power of the Dog,” a 560-page novel about the drug wars. “It was a hard one for him to write, and it took him a long time because he kept finding out things he didn’t want to know,” she said. “But it was a story that he felt had to be told.”

Winslow said he thought he’d seen “the worst of the worst” when he did his research for that 2005 book. But since then, there have been almost 50,000 drug-related murders in Mexico, and the killers are using the entrails of their victims to spell out words next to the bodies.

“You can’t keep up with the headlines,” he said.

Not that he’s going to stop trying. He said he’s excited to be working and living in San Diego County alongside such other top-notch local writers as Joseph Wambaugh and T. Jefferson Parker (both friends) during what has to be considered a heyday for crime fiction here.

“I’m excited about the future,” he said. “I feel like I haven’t written my best books yet.”